Recently I went to a writers conference. The conference itself started at 9 o'clock and went until later in that evening. There were workshops held by real authors and lots of opportunities to learn about writing. I went to a workshop to learn about the publishing companies. I learned about several jobs that are highly important in the writing process that I had no idea existed previous to this workshop. It was interesting to learn about new vocabulary that I could use in the writing community that I didn't know about before. I went to several workshops to learn how to develop better characters and build more complete, believable worlds.
Through this fun experience of learning new things about writing I've come to discover that one of the best ways to learn how to improve your writing isn't self editing, it may not even be beta readers. Its the process of learning things that you didn't know and relearning things you already knew and applying them to your writing and analyzing the way you use it wrongly in your own story. Sometimes the process of writing isn't even writing and it isn't editing and revising its simply analyzing others writing whether published or not and analyzing yours critically in comparison. That of course isn't to say that you should critically analyze your writing all the time and lower your own self esteem. You should simply understand that sometimes your writing needs and improving in some areas and in others doesn't. Whenever you critically analyze and pull apart a paragraph you should always be able to look at another paragraph and analyze just as critically what you did right and why you did it that way. In this way your writing won't suffer from your own criticisms but instead will grow.
This is what I've learned from my recent experiences at the teen writers conference.